“So I shall be expected to take quite a different view of him henceforward?” he inquired at last, looking round at her, with a very forced smile.

“I am sure I don’t know that it matters to him what view anybody takes of him,” she cried, flushing.  “He certainly takes the frankest views of other people, and expresses them.”

And while she played with the pearls in their box she gave a vivid account of her morning’s talk with the Radical candidate for West Brookshire, and of their village expedition.

There was a certain relief in describing the scorn with which her acts and ideals had been treated; and, underneath, a woman’s curiosity as to how Aldous would take it.

“I don’t know what business he had to express himself so frankly,” said Aldous, turning to the fire and carefully putting it together.  “He hardly knows you—­it was, I think, an impertinence.”

He stood upright, with his back to the hearth, a strong, capable, frowning Englishman, very much on his dignity.  Such a moment must surely have become him in the eyes of a girl that loved him.  Marcella proved restive under it.

“No; it’s very natural,” she protested quickly.  “When people are so much in earnest they don’t stop to think about impertinence!  I never met any one who dug up one’s thoughts by the roots as he does.”

Aldous was startled by her flush, her sudden attitude of opposition.  His intermittent lack of readiness overtook him, and there was an awkward silence.  Then, pulling himself together with a strong hand, he left the subject and began to talk of her straw-plaiting scheme, of the Gairsley meeting, and of Hallin.  But in the middle Marcella unexpectedly said: 

“I wish you would tell me, seriously, what reasons you have for not liking Mr. Wharton?—­other than politics, I mean?”

Her black eyes fixed him with a keen insistence.

He was silent a moment with surprise; then he said: 

“I had rather not rake up old scores.”

She shrugged her shoulders, and he was roused to come and put his arm round her again, she shrinking and turning her reddened face away.

“Dearest,” he said, “you shall put me in charity with all the world.  But the worst of it is,” he added, half laughing, “that I don’t see how I am to help disliking him doubly henceforward for having had the luck to put that fire out instead of me!”

CHAPTER VI.

A few busy and eventful weeks, days never forgotten by Marcella in after years, passed quickly by.  Parliament met in the third week of January.  Ministers, according to universal expectation, found themselves confronted by a damaging amendment on the Address, and were defeated by a small majority.  A dissolution and appeal to the country followed immediately, and the meetings and speech-makings, already active throughout the constituencies, were carried forward